


end of the line

by rillrill



Category: Hunger Games (2012), Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: AU, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Non-Canon Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-07
Updated: 2012-04-07
Packaged: 2017-11-03 04:48:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/377458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rillrill/pseuds/rillrill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>She still hates him, but she’s grown quite accustomed to finding serenity in unsafe places.</i> Written for the Girl on Fire Ficathon; prompt: victor!glimmer/cato, you win or you die, there is no middle ground.</p>
            </blockquote>





	end of the line

_and you stood so tall / but you fall / and you’re never gonna get back up / you didn’t want it enough_

   – "end of the line," sleigh bells

 

“So it is true what they say about District One.” The voice comes from behind her and she can feel his eyes all over her before she even turns. Of course. It’s Boy Two. 

She rolls her eyes and lets another arrow fly into the center of the target. Her aim is perfect. It always is.

“Glimmer,” she says, by way of introduction, and it’s to his credit that he doesn’t give a lecherous little laugh and retort “Damn right you do.” (Such responses are more common than one would expect.)

Instead, he extends a hand and says, simply, “Cato.”

She doesn’t take it. Handshakes are for allies and to be honest, she hasn’t really seen him perform yet; he’s spent much of the morning training session picking fights with other tributes and showing off for the coaches. She spins back around, loads another arrow, and sinks it into the bullseye again.

Cato, then. Good to know.

 

They take her ring just before she ascends into the arena, and it feels like just another little injustice to add to the mounting pile. The see-through dress. The silly Tribute Parade costumes. Being upstaged by Girl Twelve, damned if she can remember the girl’s name. Being stuck with Marvel the whole time, who is capable enough with a spear but otherwise amounts to conversational dead weight.

She sighs as they confiscate the ring (with which she had planned to kill her districtmate) and swears up and down that she had no idea of its true nature when she put it on. There’s no way they can really punish her. If she doesn’t die in the arena – which she won’t; that simply isn’t a distinct possibility – everyone will love her. They have to. 

 

She hates Cato. She fucking hates him with every cell in her body and yet there they are, in the woods, running with the rest of the pack and she’s giggling at everything he says because that is how you play the game: you giggle and you smile and then you slit their throats. Every time she giggles, Clove rolls her eyes, but fuck her too, she’s bound to trip and fall on her own knife sooner or later. 

She is winsome. She is beautiful (even now, with her hair falling out of its braids and blood smeared across her cheekbone from the fray at the Cornucopia). She is deadly as they come. She is a born winner.

They kill Girl Eight by her campfire that night, Cato with his sword and Clove with her knife and Glimmer sending an arrow into her heart for good measure, and Lover Boy standing back nervously, offering to finish her off once they’ve moved on. When they brush him off, he runs, and a silver parachute floats down: a gift from District 2.

The bread is still warm and they divide it equally among themselves. Glimmer takes more than her fair share, but Cato doesn’t say anything, just gives her that look. The one that says she’ll be paying him for these mouthfuls of bread later.

She really fucking hates him. 

 

They’ve got Girl Twelve treed and settle down for the night. Glimmer volunteers for the first watch because she’ll be damned if Catnip Evergreen or whatever the hell her name is shinnies down that tree trunk and heads for the hills while she’s still got two of Glimmer’s arrows with her. She sits, her back to the tree, her bow in hand as she waits.

Cato wakes up at midnight and shifts, rolling onto one side. She shoots him a look and he beckons her over.

And, well, she’s tired. He rubs her back and she breathes in the scent of him, sweat and blood and pine sap from when he failed to scale the tree, and she feels herself drifting off to sleep, his broad hands warm and calloused against her body, her bow still curled in her fingers as she nestles her face on his shoulder.

She still hates him, but she’s grown quite accustomed to finding serenity in unsafe places.

 

They’re jolted awake by a buzzing roar and sudden, sharp pain all over their bodies, and Cato pulls her up as they scream and run. She can hear Girl Four stumble and cry out behind her but they can’t turn back, bye, nice knowing you. They run and Glimmer knows she’s got the worst of it, her vision is cloudy and she’s seeing things that can’t be real – her baby sister in front of her, screaming with blood running down her face from where her eyes should be – and yet she keeps running, her hand still crushed in Cato’s grip as he half pulls her along.

When they reach the river they throw themselves headlong into the water. Clove is swearing a blue streak (they all are, but she knows the cameras will have to cut away from the younger girl “for reasons of decency”) and Glimmer’s world is still swimming before her eyes, bubbling in and out as she presses her nails into the skin around the outside of the countless stings until the world goes black.

 _Is this how it’s going to end?_ she wonders idly as she falls back into the abyss. _What a waste of all that training._

 

There’s a flicker of sky, of leaves, of trees, and then she can see again, and she’s still not entirely sure this is real. When she flexes her legs, her arms, her muscles are weak, but she can move them, and –

She can move them. She is alive.

She gradually pulls herself to a sitting position, looking around at her surroundings. She’s by the river. Okay. She’s on a rock on the bank. Cato and Clove are nowhere to be found, but Marvel is sitting nearby, poking his spear idly into the stream, cursing under his breath every time, she assumes, he misses one of the fish in the water. 

“Marvel.” Her mouth feels thick and her voice is barely a croak, but she gets his name out anyway, and his head whips around as he pulls the spear out of the water. “How long was I –”

“Only a few hours,” he says as he jumps to a standing position. “Cato and Clove voted to leave you behind. I decided to stick around, see if you came back.”

“Thanks,” she says. “Do you know where they are?”

“I think they’re looking for Twelve,” says Marvel uncertainly. 

“Boy or girl?”

“Boy. We lost him after the jacker nest hit us, but we know he’s not dead.”

“Good,” she says weakly, and tries to stand. Her muscles are weak and her movement is pained, but she manages. She starts to move toward the water to fix her hair, but Marvel pulls her back.

“I wouldn’t look at your reflection right now,” he says. “You got hit pretty hard back there.” She moves her hands over her face and recoils; the skin there is covered in lumps and blisters. She bites her lip and resists the urge to scream. It’s as if her primary weapon has been stolen from her – her looks are, without a doubt, a solid half the reason she’s here. Without them, she’s at least medium-fucked.

“Shit,” she says flatly, and picking up her bow, she starts to walk slowly but certainly into the forest.

“Where are you going?” calls Marvel from behind her. She laughs.

“I’ve got to take care of Girl Twelve.”

 

Girl Twelve is passed out not too far from the tree where she hid the night before, and it looks like she’s been hit by at least as many jacker stings as Glimmer; she’s got boils rising on her arms and her breathing is labored. Glimmer loads her bow and sends an arrow, silently, into her neck, and she’s gone before she's even awake, hoisted by her own petard. Glimmer would smirk if it didn’t hurt so badly to move her face. Instead, she yanks the arrow out of Twelve’s chest and moves on through the forest as the cannon sounds and the hovercraft descends behind her.

 

So the plan is this. She has ten arrows, less the two she wasted on Twelve in the tree. She has – how many people left to kill? Marvel and Cato and Clove, that’s three. Lover Boy, four. Both boy and girl from Eleven, six. Who else?

She thinks hard to herself. Girl Five. Boy Three. Seven. Eight. She counts on her fingers. Is that all? It feels like too few, but she’s not sure. Her mind is still hazy, but her aim is true – it had better be, after years of being hauled out of bed for middle-of-the-night shooting drills at the Academy. 

Only eight left. Ten arrows. She can do this.

 

She hides by the lake, covered by the trees as she watches Cato and Clove from a distance, and takes out Girl Five as she scampers across the clearing. A clean shot; arrow to the back and she’s sprawled across the ground, easy as that. She’s rewarded with a silver parachute containing a little jar of ointment. She spreads it over her weals and breathes a sigh of relief as they practically shrink before her eyes. Her face returns to normal as she massages the medicine into her skin.

At last.

 

Cato brings Lover Boy back to the encampment by the lake and ties him up to play with him before burying the sword in his stomach. Clove sits back and enjoys the show, cackling gleefully and occasionally urging Cato out of the way so she can flick a knife. Marvel has rejoined them by the time Twelve expires, and from her distance, Glimmer can see the three of them conferring before shaking hands.

Handshakes are for allies. She’s no longer in.

That night, Glimmer scales a tree clumsily and stumbles upon Girl Eleven, asleep in the neck of a branch. She’s almost angelic, clinging to the tree with her curls springing every which way from her head, and when Glimmer kills her, cutting just the right veins and letting her tumble like a rag doll from the tree, it is almost merciful.

Cato would have done much worse, she thinks, sliding back down from the tree as the cannon sounds. Cato would have played with her for hours, and Clove would have joined in. She was never going to win, but she didn’t deserve that.

 

She stumbles on Marvel in the woods in the morning, where he’s in pursuit of Boy Three, grinning maniacally as he jumps over logs.

Boy Three trips into a hole and twists his ankle, and just as Marvel sinks his spear into the little boy’s back, Glimmer shouts his name and loads an arrow.

He barely has time to blink before he falls to the ground, and Glimmer bounds to his side.

“Sorry,” she says, no trace of emotion evident in her voice. Can't get sentimental now.

“It’s okay,” he forces out, his fingers curled around where the arrow enters his body. “I was never going to win.”

“Yeah,” she says, unsure of what to do now. Should she shoot him again? Hang around for a few minutes so the two of them can reminisce about the good times? ( _What good times?_ ) “Still. I’m sorry it was me.”

“Just kill Cato,” he says, his breathing going ragged. “Bastard’s had it in for me since we got here.”

She laughs at this. “He’s had it in for all of us.”

“Yeah.”

She waits until he’s almost gone to retrieve her arrow, and as she pulls it out of his chest, wiping it off on her pant leg, she wants to vomit. She’s never felt this way before. She’s seen the tributes go mad from the Games, watched them snap on live TV and become reckless killing machines. But she’s never seen a Career Girl go weak.

She can’t let this happen. She steps on Marvel’s head and pushes it to the side, breaking his neck. He’s gone in an instant and she slides the arrow back into the quiver and runs.

Two cannons. Only three more now.

 

She kills Boy Eleven in his field, a straight shot to the neck from a silent distance. He struggles and then makes the mistake of pulling it out. _You fucking idiot_ , she wants to scream, _that’s the first thing they teach you, do your best to stay in one piece even if it means leaving a weapon in._ But he dies faster and then there are two.

 

Clove finds her in the woods near the lake. 

This isn’t entirely true. In the interest of accuracy, the truth is this: Clove ambushes her from behind in the woods near the lake, a knife at the ready. But Glimmer is not a beginner, you see. Glimmer knows twenty ways to break a hold and she’s got a good four inches on vicious little Clove, and even now, exhausted and near dehydration, she’s a fighter. 

She flips and pins Clove with an elbow to her throat, and laughs gleefully as she crushes the smaller girl’s windpipe with her forearm, watching the knife in her hand drop to the forest floor. She leaves her lying in a bed of clovers.

Her last word is “Cato!” 

Little girls and their crushes.

 

The mutts have them up atop the Cornucopia, and Cato’s got his sword at the ready. He’s fast. She’s faster. An arrow to the shoulder and his weapon is gone, and he falls to his knees.

As she advances on him, he looks up at her, and for the first time, she sees him look – what is it? Scared?

No. He cannot be scared. He is resigned.

“Come here,” she whispers, barely audible over the barking and howling of the mutts, and he chokes out a tired laugh.

“Please,” he says. “Don’t insult me.”

She shakes her head. “You knew it would come down to this.”

“I can still kill you.”

“No,” she murmurs. “You can’t.”

She pulls the arrow from his shoulder and kisses him at the same time, hard and deep, the kiss of a winner.

When she lets him fall over the side, she aims an arrow almost immediately. 

She always hated him.


End file.
